As most of you know, on the Classic WoW demo there were some new graphical settings for some things, including water. There has been more than a few people making the claim that transparent water will limit their ability to make effective PvP ambushes, as well as reduce the awe and excitement they felt when diving under water, not knowing what to expect.
After reviewing the low water setting on live and videos from 2006 (patch 1.12), I’ve made the realization that the water ambush was only a symptom of the times.
Let me explain. Most people had terrible PC’s during Vanilla WoW, this means they likely had their graphics settings turned low, including the water setting. The low water setting in BfA seems to completely obscure the view of what’s underneath, just like people claim was the case in Vanilla.
Here’s some screenshots I just took, displaying the difference between low water on the Modern client and ultra water settings.
TL;DR: Your water ambush only worked because most people had water settings on low. If you want all the water settings to obscure vision, you’re asking for a change.
I don’t have a huge investment in this particular thing.
I just find it funny that people act like this was such a common occurrence and a big deal, and that there wasn’t other ways to detect players beneath water.
This reminds me of people who would have a macro to change their computers display settings to be able to see in the dark in Ark, or put their field of view for objects on low but players on high so they could see people behind cover. Really annoying stuff, would hate to see something like that in wow.
At the beginning in Booty Bay, yes, but then around 5:10 or so there’s water that’s more opaque. Could be largely the effect of the moonlight on the surface.
Good catch… 5:25 is a pretty good example of it, you don’t see his body below the surface.
I will concede that it doesn’t appear consistently like that in the rest of Joanna’s video guides for other sources of water…
There are plenty of things you likely didn’t know about during actual vanilla… Very few ferals knew about manual crowd pummeler and wolf’shead helm, for example… Not many people knew the jump path into Hjyal from Winterspring… 99% of rogues couldn’t apply expose armor without breaking sap… Only a small handful of warlocks ever figured out the lock invulnerability exploit before it was nerfed… etc…
Just because YOU didn’t know about it, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist…
That said, OP could very well be correct and it merely was a settings thing that allowed it to work at all… I know I personally used the water visibility thing described multiple times in vanilla successfully… but I don’t have any way of knowing if any of the people who it worked on had potato computers/low settings, or even more simply… just didn’t have their camera facing the direction I approached from (which realistically, most of your PvP threats wouldn’t come from the ocean or a river)
While yes everything you listed was not “well known at the time”.
All of it was known enough that people did obviously pass the info around.
This however took 14 years to be “known” and now that OP has brought up the settings I could see how some may have had some success with this.
Which if people have success with this tactic some community memebers would have talked about how they got ganked by aqua rambo.
I just don’t see it as what some tried hyping it up as.
Could work but a lot could go wrong tactically with this as well.
Especially with enemy nameplates being a thing. LOL
Nameplate visibility was also significantly lower in vanilla than it is in a modern client. Was actually something that annoyed the living hell out of me when I tried vanilla again on Pservers… to be clear, I don’t mean the ability to see a nameplate when it pops up, I mean the actual range at which the nameplate even shows up to you. In current game it’s almost max visible range… On Pservers… it was seemingly almost within casting range, if not closer.
I can’t specifically remember how authentic that is, however… Pservers might have been artificially pushing fog of war type stuff like that to keep things easier to load. Or it could have just been a terrible addon… or lack of a good one. It’s more along the lines of nitty gritty mechanical things that you don’t necessarily notice much until they’re suddenly very different (like jumping from retail to a pserver)
I just checked this on BfA, it appears that the water in rivers is actually less transparent than the water in the sea. Here’s a clip where you can clearly see a turtle under the water: https://youtu.be/8lKFNczM-wY?t=633
River and sea comparison on BfA, Ultra setting: https://i.imgur.com/ZKoN8FY.png
It is, I can clearly spot that turtle plus the rocks extending into the water. However, is there anything in the river water to even try to spot?
Edit: I can see the rocks extending into the water on the river side too, of course. It is more opaque. Having a creature would be nice. I’m nitpicking I guess.
Doesnt matter why it worked, its only important that it did work. Most PVPers had water set to low to improve their overall performance and that’s something many of us were quite prepared to take advantage of.
You can’t dispel a myth that doesn’t exist… using water to hide in, whether it was to evade a gank or to propogate a gank was a legitimate tactic we used all the time.
As we speak, a guy is out there waiting to gank you. He’s submerged in a nearby pond covered in camouflage with a snorkel barely peeking out of the water.
Ofc on pservers the distance was different. They messed with draw distances and everything else they could tweak to allow 10k+ pops.
Yes draw distance was shorter in Vanilla than current live but I don’t think it was as low as pservers.
And it’ll be a tactic in Classic if people are using the old water effects, since you can’t see anything beneath the service. At least during the demo you couldn’t. Hence, you’ll put yourself at a disadvantage if you don’t use the new effects.
So besides the lack of authenticity, and clashing of aesthetic styles, the new water effects give a balance advantage. All the more reason they should be taken completely out of Classic.
If your primary concern is authenticity, then you should be glad I posted my discoveries. There’s something different between the low water setting on Modern WoW and the water in the patch 1.12 videos I linked. The low water setting on Modern WoW is opaque everywhere I go. During 1.12, either that was not the case or there were higher water settings that increased the transparency.
If there’s videos of the Classic demo showing the shore in Westfall, maybe we can determine whether or not the Classic water setting was using the Modern low water setting or if it was more like the setting in the 1.12 videos I linked.
Here’s a screenshot I just took on BfA, the only thing you can see of me are the lights on my T3 shoulders: https://i.imgur.com/oJYMEPS.png
Another screenshot but with my T3 shoulders off and the hilt of my sword above water to contrast with the lack of transparency underneath: https://i.imgur.com/Fem6F5N.png
There’s something different between the water Joana is displaying in 1.12 and the low water setting on BfA, which is what I believe they may have used as the Classic water setting on the Classic demo. In my quest to discredit the water ambush argument against Modern water, I instead found what could be another inconsistency. We just need some video of the ocean on the Classic demo.
![:rage:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/rage.png?v=6" ":rage:")